Document processing devices are in widespread use in many businesses and office settings. Such devices include copiers, scanners, printers and facsimile machines. Today, one or more functions associated with such devices are combined in a single unit, referred to as multifunction peripheral (“MFP”).
Document processing devices can be not only costly to purchase, but also expensive to maintain. This is particularly true in connection with devices that include moving, mechanical parts such as are necessary for interacting with tangible media, such as paper, film, transparencies or interfacing with removable media, such as removable drives, memory cards, flash memory devices, bar code readers, magnetic card readers, and the like. Devices require periodic maintenance operations which may include cleaning, resupplying, repairing or upgrading. Failure to provide maintenance in a timely manner can result in significant expense for repair or loss of device use.
Operations such as printing, faxing or copying may include depletion of consumables, such as paper, ink or toner. Monitoring of device operation facilitates replacement of such consumables. In other situations, monitoring of device operation facilitates assessing charges for device use. In other situations, monitoring of device operation facilitates imposition of usage quotas.
Document processing devices may include counters or other usage monitoring systems to allow for attending to maintenance or servicing operations at known intervals. An administrator would approach individual devices to determine a level of usage from its associated monitor. Third party vendors, such as Pharos™ and PaperCut™, provide solutions for centrally managing jobs, tracking usage for a number of MFPs, and enforcing usage quotas among those MFPs. However, third party solutions require a dedicated server for performing those tasks. A dedicated server not only increases management costs, but also introduces a potential point of failure in the network. When all jobs are routed through a single monitor, failure of a network or failure of a monitoring workstation would either stop document processing operations or result in lost monitoring data during the outage. In some instances, the dedicated server may be managed by a third party, further complicating management for IT professionals within an organization. Also, depending upon the capabilities of the MFP and the configuration of the network, users may be able bypass a third party's dedicated server and print to a MFP directly, which can lead to quotas not being enforced properly or job accounting discrepancies that must be rectified.